Henry James in brief

Press, 9 July 1983, Page 18

Henry James in brief

Henry James: Selected Tales. Everyman paperback, 1932. 454 pp. $7.95. (Reviewed by Diane Prout) Modern readers might wonder what the tales of Henry James, written just under a hundred years ago, have to offer in an age vastly different from the age of the Panama Canal’s building, of Sarah Bernhardt, and of western American wheat-raising and material expansion. His notoriously convoluted prose style (which prompted some wit to describe his development as a writer as “James the First, James the Second, and James The Old Pretender”) is an obstacle in itself which can daunt even the most assiduous student of English literature. His rigid social world, based on strict economic lines, is too static for today’s tastes, while his characters possess a degree of sensitivity and consciousness that is almost precious in its refinement. Yet it is in these dramas of consciousness that James explores themes that are as relevant in the 1980 s as they were in the 1890 s. These are tales which show how real life is

constantly in conflict with the idealised imagined life — how private romantic expectations are invariably at odds with a world which offers only gross materialism and spiritual emptiness. James’s age was one of rapid industrialisation, where fortunes were to be made and wealth was the entree to the glamorous salons of the Old World. That that world was decadent and frequently corrupt was no deterrent to the socially aspiring; it is the subsequent loss of illusion and the bitterness of frustration that James explores with minute precision and insight. These eight stories, chronologically ordered, represent some of James’s finest writing. Although he refused to be limited by the conventional idea of what constituted a short story, preferring to work from “the outeredge inwards,” his writing is always informed by a sense of purpose and design. That purpose is almost always to show how the demands of a dull world impinge on “the imaginative consciousness” with its accompanying sense of disenchantment.